November 28, 1953 - My Bar Mitzvah

I still wear the ring on the fourth finger of my right hand. SF in gold with a diamond. Some day it will go to my son. His initials are the same as mine. The diamond was one of three brought to this country by my maternal grandmother, Katie Rose Norinsky, when she emigrated from Russia to North Fork, West Virginia late in the nineteenth century. How she got there is another story, so why not tell it now? Or why not tell it again, as I'm sure I've told it before. Nu? Why not?

It all began when Tante Pesha and Misha Lazer got married in some backwater Lithuanian shtetl somewhere near Vitebsk. It was a marriage doomed from the git-go. Everybody said so, and everybody was right. Three months later Misha Lazer disappeared, took off without a clue except his absence. Pesha wailed and woed so much the family finally sent Shlomochaim, my grandfather, to track him down and bring him back. Which he did. In a whorehouse in Lublin. Truth. Somehow he managed to get him back to Pesha and the shtetl near Vitebsk. 

He was a great story teller, this Misha Lazer. He'd had adventures and loved to boast of them. Why he ever married was beyond any of us. Even Pesha. Why? One of his favorite stories was about the old rebbe who married a scrumptious young woman, years younger. Their wedding night, predictably, was a disaster, if you consider the disaster that nothing happened. And nothing happened night after night until the elder rebbe went to a modern younger one (but still a rebbe) for advice. His advice: hire a gorgeous hunk, a gentile, in particular, and have him watch while he waves a towel over you. Fireworks! So that night the elder rebbe and his scrumptious bride got to it with the gorgeous hunk watching and waving...still nothing. That towel flapped like a carwash and still nothing. Frustrated. Needing more advice, he goes back to the younger rebbe who tells him this time let the gorgeous hunk mount your wife and you stand there waving the towel. Such wisdom! That night the rebbe and his wife do as they have been advised. The gorgeous hunk mounts the scrumptious bride, and the old rebbe stands there waving a towel over them. Well, after a minute, the scrumptious bride begins to moan then moan some more then moan some more higher and higher more and more until she explodes with pleasure. The walls shake. The floorboards pop. The bed trembles. "You see, putz," says the old rebbe, as full of himself as a Passover goose, "Dot's de vay to vave a towel!"

As you may infer, Misha Lazer was not a man to sit still for long, and so it was that one day he was gone again. I'm going to make a long story short. They sent my grandfather, Shlomochaim, to bring him back. Which he did one more time, and then there was a third escape at which my grandfather drew the line. They must have entered the United States through Galveston, Texas because my grandfather found Misha Lazer in a whorehouse in Cinder Bottom, West Virginia. This time my grandfather sent for the family to come to the United States which eventually they did. Misha Lazer was fine with all this until he learned Pesha was on the next ship. Off he went, and, to this day, no one knows where because my grandfather refused to go after him.

And that's how they got to West Virginia, right there on the Kentucky border, territory of the Hatfields and the McCoys. They were tough Jews, all right. My mother was actually delivered by Dr. Hatfield of that famous warring family. Those who knew her knew she lived up to her deliverer. 

Thoughts on Thanksgiving, 2023

The trees are naked and vulnerable, not full and proud as they were only months ago. Summer trees make me think of British gunnery sergeants with their chests proudly puffed out. Winter trees make me think of that stone corpse writhing in agony in Pompeii, twisted limbs, trying uselessly to protect himself from the fiery ash falling from the sky. However, this, ironically, makes me think of the most beautiful thing I experienced while living in Italy. 

I had taken it into my mind that I wanted to write a screenplay. Yet, since it was the very early seventies, nobody knew much about such a thing although everybody had advice. After listening to a variety of opinions, I decided the best thing to do would be to go live some place where they didn't speak English. I spread a map of the world out on the floor and went through damn near every city in the known universe from Abu Dhabi to Zanzibar before deciding on Florence. Why Florence? I had staged managed for Edward Albee just a few years prior at the Festival of Two Worlds in Spoleto, and so I knew enough Italian to ask for the men's room but not enough to entertain anything serious like, e.g,  criticism of my screenplay. Hey, it was 1972. You didn't know any more than I did. 

So - my ambition at full court press - I jumped on Icelandic Airlines, trained down from Luxembourg, got an apartment, and moved in with all my dreams intact. Once one got used to the constant aroma of horse manure, each step and every street was charming. It was as if I'd been painted into a work of art - Sunday In The Park With Stephen. I was there in the grand tradition of glorious ex-patriotism, subject to few rules but my own. 

Since I've been a gym rat all my life, I figured there had to be one in Florence, and there was, basically, right around the corner. Nothing fancy. More like a small garage. Ratty work out clothes. No cruising. Just a few guys pumping vintage iron and babbling incessantly. Point is: in order to get to the gym I had to pass by a building called the Academia. Who cares? Right? Well, folks, the Academia had one and only one inhabitant: Michelangelo's David. Nowadays people need to book tickets months maybe years in advance for the opportunity of spending maybe an hour with the David, yet I got to see him every day, casually, walking by, dodging inside, a minute or an hour, my choice, for a year. 

I became addicted to my visits with him, his warrior grace, the way he dominated the space around him. His beauty itself was lethal. I'd see that penetrating stare focus on a point in the distance, studying something crucial, the enemy, his height, his girth. I'd see the round stone in his free hand and wonder about its weight, wonder which river he got it from, wonder if he used special stones for special purposes or shaped his own, wondered which one would kill Goliath? What must he have been thinking? I'd do his monologue. "Goliath's helmet has a flaw above the brow, and, if I can penetrate that flaw, I've got him." His sling is over his shoulder. He seems calm and pensive. Is he calculating trajectory? Wind factor? Distance to target? His is not the face of an innocent. 

Celeste/Isele by Stephen H. Foreman

 https://iselemagazine.com/november-2023/

Isele Magazine - a classy and elegant bunch - has just published my short story, Celeste. Please access it through the above address. Thank you.

Thoughts on Veteran's Day

I could have been killed and nearly was. Two mornings ago. The day began well, a bit early for me because I needed to drive an hour to a ceremony honoring veterans at Middleburgh Elementary where my good buddies, the twins, James and Michael Clark, aged seven, second grade, asked me to be their honored guest. Could I say no? There were maybe a hundred other vets there from all the branches. This is a world I'm not normally in, so I was surprised to see just how moved I was by the outpouring of pure feeling. James and Michael were thrilled, and so was I. A fine way to start the day.

And then I headed home.

I was not impaired in any way, hadn't even yet taken my normal morning meds, and yet, one moment I was almost home, an instant later flying off the road, into the woods, plowing through thick scrub with a tree coming smack at me. Deep mud - that much maligned substance - slowed me down and saved my life.There was no other car involved, no person, no animal. Just me and what little was left of my Subaru. Tore the front to shreds. No bags deployed. Ribs vaguely bruised but roaring luck intact. 

I could apply street theology to all this. What's the take-away? Had I been saved for some higher purpose? However, that's not my bent. And yet. I had, in a manner of speaking, been saved,even if the agency was thick mud,so what am I gonna do about it? Not much more than I'm doing already. Just keep on truckin'. Workin' on my stuff. Gettin' it out there. Like always. And yet. It seems as if I ought to have some vital take-away from such an experience, some visceral adjustment other than maybe my driving days came to an end against that tree, that maybe I am older than I thought I was when I set out that morning. Maybe it's that simple. "I grow old, I grow old, I wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled." That simple. 

The Next Day

Just a bit ago this evening I was having some fine time with my five year old grandson, Dorian. He's learning to read now, and it's a pleasure to point out a word and have him tell me what it is. Pirate. Penguin. Magnet. Volcano. We also went through a delicious book utilizing sound technology to play Beethoven's 5th and teach about the instruments. He now knows the difference between a cello and a bass, an oboe and a bassoon. So, I got to thinking, completely off tangent, Can you be in a State of Grace if you don't believe in God? Doesn't it depend on how you define it? I tend towards the secular - a feeling of sheer delight in being alive, thrilled to be doing what I'm doing this very moment, a connection to the most modest of inanimate objects. The pen in my hand was once crude oil was once the guts and bones of creatures that lived eons before I ever picked it up, was some sort of vegetation before that. I might be holding Triceratops in my hand right now, or a fern. If you want to connect this to God, go ahead, but I don't wish to complicate matters. It's so simple. I'll take sheer delight. Leave it that way.

So, there is a take-away, although nothing I haven't taken away before. I wish the following words were mine, but Kurt Vonnegut gets the credit. 

"I urge you all to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur at some point, "If this isn't nice, what is?"

Morgan - Ruby Tire

My father died on the night of the first seder, 1963, the second semester of my junior year at Morgan. I'd been a produced playwright for two months, both at home in Baltimore at Morgan and in New York City, a production somehow wangled by Dr. Waters Turpin on stage at Colombia University Teacher's College. He was, my father, I think, a closet comic, who was always impersonating guys like Berle and Gleason and Jackie Leonard. "Son, one of these days you're gonna find yourself, and, when you do, you're gonna be awfully disappointed," was a favorite. Also, "I guess you're not gonna be a bum after all," said in a W.C.Fields accent with his arm around my shoulders back stage opening night. 

Reuben Henry Foreman ran a business called The Ruby Tire Company, or, in Baltimorese, Rooby Tar. He turned threadbare used tires into the semblance of new ones through a process called retreading which evolved out of existence with the advent of a brand new tire cheaper than a used one (which, essentially, a retread was regardless of the way it looked). Ruby Tire was on Fremont Avenue just up from Baltimore Street in southwest Baltimore, the poorest section of the city, all Black, 360 degrees, everywhere you turned except for Ruby Tire, the package goods across the street, and Louis the Greek's restaurant on the corner. Oh, yes, and Jake the Tailor, just the other side of the alley, who sat in the window of his shop Indian fashion while he sewed with needle, thread, and thimble six days 'til closing. Every man who worked for Ruby Tire was Black as well: the Carey brothers, Jimmy and Lou, twins; Vernon Graves; Zebediah Fullwood; Claude Crocket; George Brown; Gainwell Haines aka Sporty...Sporty and I used to go down to the corner grocery and, for a quarter, buy a slug of bologna, a thick slice of onion, and a roll plus a Royal Crown soda. Then we'd sit on the sidewalk outside Ruby Tire, our backs to the wall, and munch away. I first began working for Ruby Tire at the age of eleven until my father died when I was twenty-one, some weeks six days out of six. These men were a part of my upbringing.

Ruby Tire could well be a memoir of its own, so what does it have to do with Morgan? Call it prep school. The difficulty with writing about Morgan, as I've said so many times before, is because the experience seemed so normal. Now, I've come to the conclusion that Morgan seemed so normal because Ruby Tire seemed so normal. I never questioned whether these men were better than me or worse than me or even that different from me. They were just guys who worked for my father like I did. From the point of view of an experienced octogenarian, of course, I now see the difference, but I didn't then. Except for my Marine Corps tour, until my father died, Ruby Tire was an integral part of my life, more days than not. My brother and I fixed flats and stacked rubber like everybody else. But, before my junior year was over, Ruby Tire was at its end.

Two months after my father's death his partner declared bankruptcy throwing the business up for auction. The plan was nefarious. Partner declares bankruptcy. Business goes to auction. Auction goes to rich in-laws who buy it back debt free and unencumbered by a partner's obligations to the surviving family. In other words, our family would be completely cut loose from the business...unless...I...bought...it...back. A beloved uncle said he'd put up the money if I wanted, and went with me to the auction as did two dear friends from Morgan, Jean Wiley and George Barrett, both now dead as is my uncle, of course. 

Auction day was a hot one in mid summer. It was held in the alley bordering the business and attended sparsely. Uncle Milton was to my right. Jean and George to my left. The auctioneer stood on the roof of a car (That's what I remember) and began his spiel. Suddenly, there was a price tag attached. A ridiculously affordable one. A set up. Unless I bought it. The countdown began. "Do I hear..." My uncle said, "Do you want it?" "Do I hear..." "Do you want it?" Did I want it? Steve's Tire Town? "Do I hear..." Did I want... "Do you want it?" Did I want it? No, God damn it, I don't want it. Didn't want it. Let the bastards have it. I don't want to drop out of school. I don't want to drop out of my life. Let the bastards have theirs, and I'll have mine. "Sold," bellowed the auctioneer, and that was that.

Thoughts Engendered By A Friend's Curiosity

 A friend, when he discovered I rarely watch film and television, asked with shock, "What do you do all day?" It's a monastic existence, I admit, but still rife with anticipation. How many miles to go before I sleep, and what will I do with them? As my friend, Mr. Priestly, said, "I have always been delighted at the prospect of  a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning." 

So, I got to thinking: how does this writer spend his day? I have no meetings, script conferences, no long term planning sessions. Phone calls are few and mostly unanswered. Not yours, of course. I'm talking hucksters and scam artists, although if they were truly artists they would have caught me. Details. It's all in the details. Pay attention. So many details take up so much time that the day passes without knowing where it went. (We joke about watching paint dry, but what could be more Zen? The sound of one hand clapping? Really?) Just suppose you believed that all the earth and everything in it were sacred, so much so that every step you took was taken on hallowed ground. Every step. Everything you smelled and touched. Just sayin'. Everything you saw and heard. Suppose you believed that every pebble, every beetle, every mote of dust were somehow sacrosanct? Chris Hedges, a radical journalist with whom I currently disagree, said the point is, "To tie the most mundane moments of existence to the eternal mystery of the cosmos."  I think about the Buddhist monk whose words taught me to "chop wood, carry water." How to transform the most basic of tasks. To do what you do and not do anything else but that. To pay attention. Just stop and think it through. To follow the connections. To grasp that one is a part of all this. It takes thought and attention to detail and that takes time but time passes and so does the day. Is there always magic waiting somewhere behind the morning? Of course not, but there is always that possibility. 

And so I spend my day kind of meandering from one moment to the next, dawdling as much as I want, establishing the flow, or so I try. And try. And try.

The Buddha was sitting under his tree when a horseman raced by.

    "Where are you going?" asked the Buddha

    "Ask my horse," answered the rider.        

Morgan - A Girl I Once Knew

1962

    I remember her walk. I'd be sitting in the student union when she'd come in, smile, and walk over to me. She had a wonderful walk -- slow and easy, fluid, without a hint of effort. She'd walk over to me and then we'd sit there and talk, about nothing much.            

    Marion Tyree was in the Ira Aldridge Players, the school's drama society. Now that I was sort of a playwright, so was I. I don't remember what she did in the group nor do I remember how we met, but being in the club broke down barriers, and we began to talk. Her voice sounded so pleasant with just a hint of a southern accent. She was slender and very dark. I was Jewish and pale as a biscuit. We must have had crushes on each other, but I remember being with her was like a slow canoe ride across a lake rather than the turbulence of shooting whitewater. I don't remember being on guard for rocks, but I imagine I was, and I imagine she must have been, too. After all, it was 1962 in a city that slanted south. She was Black, and I was White. Yet, I don’t remember an issue, nothing fraught, no sense of anything we shouldn’t have been doing, no conversations I couldn’t have had with someone else. We were still children of the fifties, innocent and pristine. It was enough to simply sit together in the student union between classes and just talk.

    Somewhere in here Dr. Turpin, mentor to the drama society, producer and director of my play, a fine man to whom I owe the beginning of my writing career, told me he'd made arrangements for the play to be produced in New York. The Ira Aldridge players, cast and crew, would be headed for the bright lights of Off-Broadway on stage at the Columbia Teachers College way uptown but a bite of the Big Apple nonetheless. Marion and I would be hundreds of miles from our hometown. We never spoke about it, but I doubt that was lost on either of us. This is what I remember: not a lot about rehearsals or performance but a taxi ride with Marion Tyree down to Greenwich Village to see Jean Genet's "The Blacks'' starring a young actor named Louis Gossett. Another couple shared the cab with us: a friend and fellow student from Morgan, another Marine as I had been, Reg Kearney, and his date, a coed from Barnard. I still don't know how he managed to pull that one off in the limited time we were in the city, but he did. Reggie had hit his trifecta: she was zaftig, white, and Jewish. Reggie was in heaven. All four of us were in the back seat, so I sat as close to Marion as I'd ever been. I cautiously put my arm around her, and she settled in. Nestled in. It was a small move and gentle, and felt so right. After the show (which was electrifying) we walked to a restaurant, and, for the first time, we held hands, right there, out in the open, we held hands. At first I thought every set of eyes in New York City was on us, and then I realized none were. We held hands and walked to the restaurant, and I was happy. I was a produced playwright, and I was holding hands with Marion Tyree.

    When Marion’s grandchildren were grown she told them about me. “He was a white boy,” she said. “No, grandma, no,” they screamed. “And he was Jewish,” she said. “Grandma, no,” they yelped in disbelief. Then came the kicker.” And he was a good kisser, too,” she said, and laughed when they squealed and went wide-eyed. “Oh, no, grandma, you didn’t!” “Yes, I did,” said Marion, totally delighted with their reaction. At that moment she became a legend to her grandchildren who couldn't conceive of grandma ever doing such a thing. But we did do such a thing, and it has become a cherished memory.

    If I had been born a ship I would have been a fishing trawler. My nets were out trawling for stories long before I even knew I wanted to tell them, countless details hauled around for years like heavy cartons of old books I could not leave behind. Thoughts and people; smells, colors, sounds. It’s not clear when things began to sort themselves out, but, when they did, Morgan was such a story. Marion Tyree was such a story, a story I will happily tell ‘til my gums dry up and my mouth withers away. It was all so nice and easy. We saw a play. We were hungry. We walked down the street looking for a place to eat, and we held hands. 

                                       THE END

Morgan - Northwood

Northwood theatre was a segregated movie theatre in a segregated shopping center six blocks from campus. Students couldn't eat in the restaurant, try on clothes in the store, nor take a seat in the movies. Mostly, it didn't matter: the food was terrible, and the clothes were out of date, but the movies, that was a different story. Even if all there were to see were Doris Day and Rock Hudson, that was date night, and everybody wants to go to the movies, especially one that was six blocks away. 

The student president (I believe his name was Reggie Louis) called a meeting of student leaders and proposed Morgan State spearhead an action to integrate the Northwood Theatre. Picketing, of course, but also trespassing, i.e., the possibility of arrest. We had to be prepared for that. I wasn't. A decision I regret to this day. I'd picket and do anything short, but I wasn't ready to get arrested. I was still tethered to my family in such a way that the idea of an arrest pumped fear into my guts, not so much of the police, but having to deal with my family's disdain and displeasure. I was in the process but not yet ready to completely sever my ties. I remember the shame I felt when I told Reggie Louis that my arrest was out. He said he understood, however, had I been he, I would have thought much less of him than before he admitted he didn't have the cojones to go through with it. I did picket (and never felt so naked in all my life), but an arrest was out. Dozens of students, many friends of mine, went to the slammer but not this one. It's one of those things in my life that if I had it to do over...you know what I mean.

Onward.

One big irony. Well, actually, two. Northwood Theatre was owned by the father of a friend of mine at the time, not a close friend, but a guy I sometimes hung with. His name was not Albert so I'll call him Albert. Al was always bugging me to take him with me when I went to parties at Morgan. I rarely went to parties myself, and I damn sure wasn't about to take him with me when I did go to one. Here his father wouldn't let them in, but Albert wanted to party. Draw your own conclusions. Once he saw me on the picket line that was pretty much the end of our relationship. I managed to navigate all my different worlds rather smoothly, going from one to the next simply doing what had to be done while there, but there were some relationships that had to be severed. 

About this time, Freedom Rides were being taken along the Eastern Shore, arguably the most racially hostile part of Maryland. Freedom Riders were integrated groups of Blacks and Whites who chartered buses in an attempt to integrate the restaurants, bars, bowling alleys, and other businesses in the area. The buses always faced hostility from white mobs, often met with outright violence. Firebombing a bus full of passengers was a favorite. One time an African diplomat, royalty in his own country, was refused service. He was not a freedom rider, only a diplomat (a prince, actually) in a private car headed to Washington, D.C. When the owner of the restaurant was told of this man's stature, his response was, "He looked just like any other nigger to me." Well, a girl I was dating at the time thought this was the funniest thing she'd ever heard, made her laugh so hard she damn near screamed, damn near peed herself she thought it so funny. I can still hear her. It was repugnant. I can't remember what I said or even if I were so disgusted I said nothing at all,  but I do remember turning and walking away, never to see her again. How dare she? How dare anybody?

I said there were two ironies. Here's the second one: the mayor of Baltimore was the father-in-law of my cousin. Legend has it that, after weeks of student protests and arrests, he strode into that theatre, pointed his finger at the owner, and ordered, "You will integrate this theatre now." And the waters calmed. And the Northwood was integrated." Such is legend. It made it seem as if it were the mayor's command - Moses parting the sea - and not the three weeks of blood, sweat, and tears endured by the students that broke down that barrier and integrated that place. No politician did this. No white saviour. Morgan did. It was an act of devotion and determination pulled off by a student body determined to be polite yet determined not to budge.

        

        

Morgan - I Become A Playwright - part two

Talk about sophomoric. Before the Beginning, After the End. That was its title. My first play. Set in the womb-tomb of time-space. Very eerie sound track by a fella named Satie. Eric. Wouldn't touch it today, but, there it was: my virgin voyage. I'd written poetry (or what I fancied passed for poetry) for years, however, except for school compositions, I'd never written anything else. It wasn't my intent to write anything else this time either, certainly not a play, but it somehow came out that way - an older man and a younger man arguing about - what else? - Life. Me 'n' my father? Who are you? Dr. Phil? 

My writing career may not have begun at Morgan, but it certainly got a jump start there. Opening night the Morgan auditorium was packed. It was a fine night - beautifully dressed and well bespoke folks right there because I had written something. It was a lead article in the Afro-American, the local Negro newspaper. Politicians, local gentry, students, faculty, friends, family -- all right there filling all five hundred seats in the Morgan auditorium. To see something I had written. After the performance, my father came up to me backstage, put his arm around me, and said, "Well, I guess you're not gonna be a bum after all." I remember him standing there all natty in his gray Chesterfield topcoat with the black velvet collar. We weren't close. He died two months later. Often I felt he was disappointed in me because I wasn't very good at very much. There was one time, however. One other time. 

I'd been away from home for five months, three on Parris Island, two at Camp Lejeune. In that time I became a United States Marine. My first liberty I arrived in Penn Station, Baltimore, in uniform, red PFC hash mark on my sleeve, marksmanship medal on my chest, and walked towards the entrance to meet my father who was walking in the opposite direction. Towards me. And damn if he didn't walk right by me!

        "Dad," I called out.

He stopped, turned, saw me, recognized me, choked up and stifled a cry. I wish I could remember what we said to each other. I wish I could remember whether we hugged or shook hands. 

One play led to another. Morgan was gracious enough to grant me an honors scholarship which obligated me to write another play. I can't remember anything about it except the actress sat in a rocking chair. This play opened at Center Stage, Baltimore's only professional theatre. After almost sixty years the actress, Carolyn Dotson, and I still talk from time to time. This past time - just a couple of weeks ago, actually - she told me something I hadn't known: our play broke the color line at Center Stage. We did that. Yes, we did. We broke the color line. 

Morgan granted me a third opportunity as well. A local television station approached the drama department about doing some kind of project together. As a result, I wrote a show called, The Unknown American, the first TV program ever to document in detail the contributions to the United States of its Negro population. The range and breadth of accomplishments was astonishing to all of us, in science and business, military, medical, academic, literary, as well as the arts and entertainment. The Unknown American. Morgan students appeared in and narrated it. It even won a few awards, as I recall. The Unknown American. Not any more. Go, Morgan!

Morgan - I Become A Playwright

I was seventeen when the trifecta kicked in. That same year I heard Miles Davis', Kind of Blue; read Jack Kerouac's, On the Road; had my heart broken for the first time. I remember sitting in a circle in an unheated beatnik "pad" feeling oh, so cool, yes, cool, but dark and brooding as well. Portrait of the artist. Lord Byron. "Mad, bad, and dangerous to know." I remember thinking Kerouac had written me a personal letter. "Where do y'wanna go, amigo? I'll take you there!" I remember the agony of that broken heart, worse, I fancied, than the malaria our troops contracted in the jungles of Burma. It came in waves. Each wave worse than the last. Seventeen, and I wanted to die. Instead, I wrote poetry. It was this trifecta that years later led me to Morgan. Let me explain.

Why a blues loving poetry freak decided on medical school is a matter of speculation? But, there y'go. America in the fifties played by stricter rules, and those rules dictated a button down conformity that no longer exists in the same gun point way. Kerouac might have become my guru, but med school was still my go to, as if carving a cadaver in a cold morgue were the same as reading Keats', "When I have fears that I may cease to be...", on a windy hillside.

Heartbroken, infused with the rhythm of beat street, wailing with Miles' horn, broke down and undone, I wrote my first poem, a love poem: Love is a feeling, a feeling feeling, a hell of a feeling, a wonderful ecstatic feeling, or is it...? What a load of crap, huh, but it caught on, and suddenly I was reading my poem to packed houses in coffeehouses up and down the East Coast. Suddenly, I was a real live poet complete with Beatnik "chick", Shelly, who wore too much eye make-up and, after I finished my reading, would roam through the audience with a bread basket beseeching , "Bread for the poet". Can you believe this crap? All true. Shelly managed to rupture my heart even further by running away to South America with a drummer.

What has all this got to do with Morgan? I was still a poet when I got there. The Marines never stopped me. In fact, it was in the Corps that I discovered Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, both World War One poets of immense power. It was also at the base library in Camp Lejeune that I discovered, "Johnny Got His Gun" by Dalton Trumbo. I don't know what the base librarian had in mind, but that material burrowed deep down into my soul, and I've never been the same since. Once a Marine always a Marine. True. Still, something lodged like grape shot, dug in, and stayed there. I no longer harbored the desire to do bodily harm to someone else equally as innocent as I now knew I was. At this point in my life I consider myself fortunate that I never saw the worst of it except that I've been left with a serious case of "Survivor's Guilt". Better that.

I don't know where the idea came from, but it struck me that I had a poem to write that was essentially a dialogue between two men - an old one and a young one. As usual, once I got started I could not stop, even during class which, in this case, was romantic poetry taught by Dr. Holmes, a gentle man with doe-like eyes and coca colored skin. After class he asked me what I'd been writing, gave me a skeptical glance when I told him I'd been taking notes, and gestured for me to turn it over. I remember him wiggling his fingers. It was Friday. I did. He read it, told me to finish it. Go home and give it to me Monday, he said. I remember running to the library and writing 'til the lights went off then writing furiously all week-end until the thing was finished - a very lengthy poem that was kind of like a play. Kind of. I'd never written one before and didn't know I was writing one now, a play in verse, no less. Anyway, Dr. Holmes read it, turned it over to Dr. Waters Turpin, head of the drama department, who took it the next step, produced and directed it. The production even went to a venue in New York City. Now, I was a junior at Morgan State College and a playwright. Life was finally getting to be fun.

PS

The following excerpt is all I remember of my play. It's the young man speaking to the old one.

"This I know and only this, that I am given a life, a gift that only once I will receive to do with as I choose, and I choose to wring it dry of all its pleasures so that when I am wombed in death's certain eternity I cannot reflect in anguish that I have had but birth and death and nothing more."

I was twenty-one. Say what you will. It got me into Yale.

Morgan - The First Day Of School

Nobody said a word, at least, not to my face. Nobody frothed at the mouth. Nobody cursed. Nobody’s face twisted in hatred and anger. If they were thinking I didn’t belong there they didn’t show it. I might just as well have been another student. I was aware of the difference, but it made little difference to me. A few minutes before I had been crossing campus in the middle of the quad when the bell rang to change classes. Two thousand five hundred and ninety-nine Negroes and one white boy. Surrounded. You’d think that would’ve snagged my attention, and, being human, I guess it must have, but not for long. A nanosecond. Maybe it took me that to realize that the world as I’d known it had changed. Of course, that was the case with the Marine Corps as well. Life after Parris Island would never again be the same, even now, as I write this, sixty plus years later. Except most of my fellow Jarheads were white. Not now. Just me. Singular. Only no one seemed to notice but me. Whatever negative thoughts they harbored, the students kept them to themselves. No one ever even asked me what I was doing there.

What was I doing there?

My academic record was so abysmal that my choices were limited to none. I had failed out of college yet again. Re-upping for another tour of active duty was a possibility, but my personality was no longer suitable to such an authoritarian institution. I had “Sir, yes, Sirred” one last time. A neighbor, a white woman, suggested Morgan. She worked as a secretary to Dean Whiting, dean of students. Why not talk to him? Why not?

It was a hot, humid day between the start of summer school and the end of the semester when I set foot on campus for the first time. Dr. Whiting had agreed to meet with me. He was a gentle man with a sweet smile in an office lined wall to wall with books. I don’t remember our conversation, but I must have plead my case: Gimme another shot, please. I do remember his response: what makes you think you’d do any better here? And that’s when years of delusion came crashing to a halt. Because I’d be studying what I wanted, not what other folks expected of me. I’d taken it into my head that pre-med was the way to go, that comparative vertebrate morphology and not Wordsworth was my future. I can blame my parents for a lot but not that. I think my Dad didn’t really care what I did. Maybe he just assumed I’d go into the business. That would’ve been fine with Mom, as well. So, it wasn’t them. The notion just seeped in. Be respectable. Be a doctor. All the while, nobody really cared but me. 

Education Of A White Boy - Morgan State College

1955

I was a sophomore in high school when the first Black kids integrated the place. My parents' decision: you're going to school. Walking through that venomous mob of protesters was bloodcurdling. I prayed, “Please, God, don’t let them find out I’m Jewish.” About that same time, Gwynn Oak amusement park, a great date place, a Caucasian crowd, foam and spittle from their twisted mouths, massed violently and threatening at the entrance. I watched from across the street with fear in the pit of my stomach. Even so, it was hard to turn away. It was the ugliest thing I’d ever seen except for all the other ugliest things exactly like this. I’ve come across photographs of lynch mobs leering at the camera with Black bodies hanging from trees, same faces of the mob that assaulted the Capitol, proud and stupid and murderous. Look at those photos side by side - proud and stupid and murderous white people. I’ve had an entire spectrum of feelings (sometimes within minutes), but it’s hard to imagine feeling that much hatred. If I were an actor I think I’d go mad trying to recreate such a vile and nasty cesspool for my character. A plague came to our shores in 1619, metastasized, and infects everything we do from fixing potholes to walking on the sidewalk. And everything else. Remember “Love it or leave it”? Leave it. I don’t want you here.

OK

Morgan State College in Baltimore, Maryland is an historically Black college, now a university. I graduated Morgan in 1964, the only white guy matriculating there at that time, with a BA in English and minors in philosophy and German, well prepared for my next stop - Yale. I am grateful they took me, and fortunate to have stayed. It was shortly after I was discharged from active duty Marine Corps. Then Yale? Who da thunk it? I still carry the pain and humiliation from years of academic failure. I failed out of college three times, high school as well. My average for ninth grade algebra was Zero. Zero! I didn’t get one single question correct for one entire year. Not kidding. Not one. Jules Older, a friend and former classmate, and I covet the honor of being the only two Jewish boys to ever fail out of the “A” course. Jewish boys simply didn’t do that. A serious “shanda”. And that was only the beginning. So, how the hell did I get into Yale? Truth is, I admit to having been a bit nervous about all those students from Harvard, Dartmouth, Berkeley, Sarah Lawrence, Tufts...Yeah, so what, big shot, you graduated magna cum laude? But, you didn't go to those schools. You went to Morgan. Was Morgan Triple A? Great players but never the majors? I knew full well the brilliance of my professors and the serious pursuits of the students. Didn’t matter. A latent virus, a feeling I would rather have done without yet there it was. 

Our first serious exam at Yale was dreaded by my class, but no way to avoid it. I studied as if everything were at stake, which it was. I worked as hard as I did in the Corps because everything was at stake, which it was. At Morgan we’d have our arms around each other’s shoulders, swaying gently in a circle, singing “We shall Overcome” with such hope, such yearning, such kindness.On Parris Island we’d stand at attention in front of our racks before lights out singing “The Marine Corps Hymn” at the tops of our lungs. Both will bring me to tears. I enlisted in the Corps because my life seemed to be at a dead-end. I graduated from Morgan feeling I could do anything I chose to do as long as I chose wisely. 

  

Folks have been urging me for years to write about my days at Morgan. I understand their enthusiasm. You’d think it’d be a cakewalk. No lack of material, right? Morgan always crackled with energy. The days were vibrant. Even so, college was day to day normal. Campus wasn’t on fire; my brain, finally, was. I was happy as I hadn’t been since kindergarten. Yet, it was so normal. I don't know what else to call it. Men carried briefcases, wore sport coats and ties. Women wore Jackie Kennedy pill box hats, purses, and white gloves. Football rallies, fraternities and sororities, lectures, labs, exams, papers, ROTC, grad school applications...Fact is those years at Morgan were intellectually lively but politically, with one major exception, fairly uneventful. Of course, civil rights was an issue all over campus, but it hadn’t yet become radicalized. Black Power was not yet a meme. Really, Morgan, was no different than any other campus. I'd been tossed out of enough schools to attest to that fact.

  

Yes, the civil rights years were brewing. Kennedy was assassinated. Stokely was in the wings. Rafer Johnson visited campus to pitch the Peace Corps. Of course, most of the students were politically sophisticated and angry, itching to get into it but not yet, as I remember, truly radicalized. Selma was still years away. Malcolm X traveled to campus to debate Professor August Meier representing Morgan. Dr. Meier, a Caucasian sociology prof, a passionately devoted if bumbling Leftist, way before it became popular. I remember him rushing across campus like Groucho Marx, arms bursting with papers, disheveled, dogmatic. Martin Luther King, Jr. at that time was the major political and philosophical influence. A goodly portion of the audience left the debate still partial to Dr. Meier’s arguments which, basically, were Reverend King’s. They wanted the american dream but a dream that included them. The student body then determined to integrate a nearby movie theater in a shopping center only a quick walk from the school where students were not allowed to eat, not allowed to shop in the department store, not allowed to try on clothes. They endured arrests and venom, but damn well did it, three weeks of blood, sweat, and tears endured by the students that broke down that barrier and integrated that place. Ironically, the theater was owned by the father of a guy I knew socially. One further irony: my cousin Peggy’s father-in-law, Phil Goodman, was mayor of Baltimore at the time. Feisty guy. Wrestling champion. Local legend has it he marched into the theater, confronted the owner, and bellowed, “You will integrate this place now!” However, no politician did this. Morgan students did. It was an act of devotion and determination pulled off by a student body determined to be polite yet determined not to budge.

Go, Bears!

And that fearsome exam at Yale? I scored highest out of some two hundred others. I consider those years the beginning of my life. From then on, I didn’t know everything, and neither did anybody else.

My March On Washington

Sixty years ago I was in the summer of my junior year at Morgan State College, Baltimore, Maryland, a southern city below the Mason-Dixon Line, and my home town, the only White boy in a student body of 2,600 Blacks. Many people over the years have told me I should write about it, but I've never been able to because, actually, it all seemed so normal. Coeds dressed in pillbox hats (a la Jackie Kennedy), wore white kid gloves, and carried purses. Sport coats, ties, and briefcases were prominent among the guys. Football, social life, fraternity and sorority activity, and grades were the things most cared about. Black Power was barely an intellectual concept. Stokely and H. Rap would not be center stage until my senior year. Nobody was radicalized, yet, but most of us were in the process of being so. Brave students had sat in at a lunch counter in North Carolina. Rosa Parks had refused to stand up. Civil Rights was brewing but not yet boiling. I didn't consider myself a radical -- I still don't -- but I was no longer able to ignore the criminal injustice of racial relations in my country. I had to be on that march, not just because my life at Morgan would have been untenable if I did not, but because I knew the time had come for me to participate. As the Baptist preacher declared, "I been called."

When the day of the march arrived, Morgan students caravaned by the chartered bus load  from Baltimore to Washington, D.C., although I did not go with them. That morning I dressed in a grey, light weight summer suit, white button down shirt, cordovan wingtips, and thin rep tie, and took a Greyhound bus from Baltimore to D.C. by myself. I was determined to be on that March, but I didn't want to be hidden within a contingent of other students. I wanted to be seen. It was time for me to do my part, and this would be it. So I walked alone. It wasn’t, I don’t think, the ego’s fear of getting lost in the crowd but the inability to make a statement because I’d be invisible, and, if I were invisible, what was the point? I kept distance between the groups in front and back of me so I would be obvious. I wanted to stand up and stand out as a well-dressed white man who could no longer ignore the cruelty of racism. I remember feeling naked and exposed - scared a little, really. It was sweltering - August in D.C. - but I kept my tie neatly around my neck and my suit jacket buttoned with the cuffs of my shirt remaining a proper single inch beyond the jacket sleeve, and still I wondered, foolishly, naively, if this was what it felt like to be stark naked facing a pack of snarling dogs? I went with the crowd as it pushed towards the Lincoln Memorial and found myself in position to see Dr. King quite well while he gave his legendary speech: “I have a dream…” His words snatched those snarling dogs and shut them up quick. I heard the words clearly and knew I had just witnessed something extraordinary. Martin had declared his dream. I felt like I was part of a grand army. I felt so proud. I wasn't alone anymore. 

I rode back to campus with the rest of the Morgan students. We disembarked and, before going our separate ways, formed a circle with our arms around each others shoulders,  closed our eyes, and swayed and sang, "We shall overcome..." It was a different time. 

I’d been cautioned by my mother in Baltimore not to get involved, however, as I’d been lying to her for most of my remembered life, anyway, I had no trouble assuring her not to worry. I had to go to work; I wouldn’t be there. Don’t worry, Ma.

That evening, my mother asked me how my day was in that way she had when she knew she’d nailed you. I said, “Fine.”

“Work was…?” she asked.

“Fine,” I answered.

“You lied to me,” she said, and I knew she knew, though she remained uncharacteristically composed.

“How’d you know?”

“Your cousin, Doris, called from San Diego. Her whole family spotted you today on tv.”

“Yeah?”

“Every network.”

“What’d they say?”

“They said you looked respectable.”

“I guess so,“ I said and wagged my tie.

“Where is this going to lead?” she wanted to know.

“I don’t know,” I answered.

I wasn’t lying. I really didn’t. I still don’t.

Why I Don't Have A Cell Phone

I don't wear a watch or carry a cell phone. I wear a wedding band on my left hand and my Bar Mitzvah ring on my right, but that's all. I want my hands free. If I want to know the time I'll look at the clock or ask someone. If I want to know the weather I'll look outside. A cell phone is not some magic trinket bringing true love and order to my life. If I never had to talk on the phone that'd be just dandy with me but especially do I not want to answer the phone while I'm crouched down hunting for kosher salt in the supermarket, for example, or anything else for that matter. I'm sorry. I'm doing something. But the phone's ringing! So? I'm doing something. Where is it written that when someone calls, one must answer regardless of what one is in the middle of, or not in the middle of, or in the middle of absolutely nothing at all (which is where I can often be found).

I don't think I'm a Luddite.  On the other hand, I don't think necessity is the mother of invention, either. Invention - we're still on the other hand - is the mother of necessity. To wit: the FAX machine. Did we need it until we had it? Where is it now? Was it even in our wildest dreams - the ability to get your deli's menu on a print-out? And the web? Fuggedaboudit! Who even knew? Who even guessed what a greedy part of our ecosystem it's become? 

Everybody I know's always looking for their phone, always leaving it somewhere, or dropping it. And they're all upset about it. Where's my phone? OMG! Oops. And when they've got it, "Gotta jet. Runnin' out of juice." Do I really need to honor something that brought the butt dial to prominence? I'm no different from anybody else. If I had it I'd be losing and looking at it, too, and, yet, there are so many more wonderful things to see off-screen. What we're talking here is freedom. The freedom not to. Kris Kristoferson wrote and Janis Joplin sang, "Freedom's just another word for nothin' left to lose". The fewer machines tying me to them the better. Maybe I am a Luddite.

Happy 43rd

It's said we don't meet the people we love, we recognize them. Come August 12th we'll have been married forty three years. My goal is fifty. Beyond that? Forty five years ago we didn't know each other - but came that instant later - a door opened, literally - we connected and that was fade in with a smash cut. Her smile was bright as the lighthouse at Alexandria where mirrors captured the sun. They reflected its rays and aimed them back at enemy ships until they burned and sank. Well, that night, around 8pm, when that door opened and that lighthouse cut loose, my ship burned and sank. But, J was a pretty good swimmer and has kept me afloat ever since then. Mazel tov, Toots. I love you truly. And good luck.

Being Jewish

If the following piece sounds familiar, it may be, as I first published a version nine years ago. The past few days have been fraught with domestic bric-a-brac (insurance claims, tax forms, scams, medical billing systems, that kind of stuff) which has crowded out many new thoughts. Therefore, this old one. I haven't changed much of it.

"I am a Jew," were the last words uttered by Daniel Pearl as his executioner beheaded him. "I am a Jew." The composure needed to say those words at that instant elevated the man and his courage into that eternal realm where myth lives, and where the hideousness of his slaughter is not what we remember, but his words, "I am a Jew.", his last four words that will go on speaking to us forever. Would I have had the courage to do the same? Would I have it now? What would it feel like to have that blade sawing through your throat knowing you had a nanosecond to say something that mattered? A recent daydream bears witness. I was musing about what I'd die for (not from), and of course my wife and children pretty much pushed out everything else. Would I take a bullet for a local congressman? Hell, no, mostly hell no's when it comes to whatever I would take a bullet for period. Why would I? Then something bored its way through that mass of "Why would I?", and I suddenly found myself asking myself if I'd change my religion to keep from dying. Check this out: I'm tied to a pole against a stone wall facing a firing squad. The man in charge gives me a choice. He's sincere. He really wants me to do the right thing. He doesn't want to kill me. Renounce Judaism. That's all I had to do. He's almost begging me. Convert to mine. And I look at him then at the squad of men only a few yards away, seven rifles pointed at my heart, and I say, "Fire." I surprised myself. I knew it was true.

Wherever I went through this old world I never hid the fact that I was Jewish even though my travels took me to places where Jews were scarce or not at all. I felt like I was an emissary of some sort. "You think you know Jews? Well, amigo, check this one out." I also felt like I'd better get the info out that I was Jewish before somebody made a crack thinking there were no Jews in the vicinity. At the Marine Corps Recruit Depot, Parris Island, South Carolina, my first five minutes into the squad bay I'd be sharing with seventy-five other boots my Drill Instructor called my name out from a clipboard followed by "Get over here!" where he wrapped his fist in my t-shirt and stuck his face smack into mine and said, "You're a Jew. I've never had a Jew in my platoon before. I'll be watchin' you." I can't remember exactly how I felt but it must have been all kinds of terror. "Sir, yes, Sir!" Many weeks later this same DI saved my ass. I had appeared before his hatch with some request only to find another DI with him there from a neighboring platoon who did indeed begin to Jew bait me. Little things. Snipes. But I knew what it was. Finally, he asked me if I knew what the fastest thing in Germany was in World War II? I knew what it was. I'd heard the joke in high school. "I asked you a question, private," said the DI demanding an answer. I knew we had just crossed into a danger zone, but I saw my own DI place a hand on his buddy's arm to stop him. I never had to answer the question. Just in case you're aching to know, "A Jew on a bicycle." Germany. World War II. Get it?

I haven't been to a synagogue in the United States probably in decades, but nearly everywhere I've ever been in this world, if there is a synagogue I find myself  in it. I do not fall down on my knees or scream the holy holy, but I want to see in it and sit in it, hold the prayer book and wonder that one side of the page is in Hebrew, with which I am familiar, but that the other side is in some foreign language. Shalom is the word that binds the two: peace. I learned it had an "Open, Sesame" effect, but you'd have to say it first.

In the Spring of 1973 some miscue found my then wife and I abandoned in Prague. This was years before Prague became the go-to city for hip, young travelers. What it was when we arrived was dismal, gray, and dreary. Even the drizzle seemed dirty. We knew no one but had the name of the hotel written on a scrap of paper. Russian troops were stationed every where we looked, so we made our way to the hotel by showing the scrap of paper to one soldier after another, connecting the dots, so to speak, until we arrived at a tattered hotel that looked like the dilapidated exterior of an eastern European spy set. Its interior reflected its exterior: chipped paint and poorly lit, not exactly a tired traveler's dream. But we had a room! We also had a rude desk clerk who shook his head no English. But we did have a room and climbed upstairs to reach it. The room: Don't think Martha Stewart; don't even think Bates Motel. Think Svetlana Stalin. Decor by. OK. Now what?

I spread a map of the city out on the bed, and there, in the midst of the old city, not far away from where we sat, was a cluster of buildings colored gold, right down the street, a cluster of gold buildings!. Let's go. It was Friday evening nearing sundown, a little chilly, but we were in the streets over which millions of feet for thousands of years had gone before us, and the adventure was on. Kafka walked here. I imagined the Kaballah being argued by a gaggle of men with ear locks on these narrow stone streets. Two Jews. Three opinions. Right? We passed the cathedral in the main square from which berserk parishioners during long ago Easters, goaded by homicidal priests, went from church to storm through the Jewish quarter doing as much damage as they could to people like me. Why didn't I just turn around? Why was I drawn further into this part of the city? If I had to escape where would I go? But that was silly. Why would I have to escape? It was 1973.

We passed a nondescript building where shabbiness had settled like a threadbare shawl around an old lady's sagging shoulders. The guide notes said it was a 13th century synagogue. A man stood out front, well dressed in top coat and hat. "Shalom," I said, and he said, "Shalom" right back. His next sentence asked in English, "Are you an American?" Whoa! Well, it turned out  the reason he knew English so well was because he had two sons who worked for American Airlines in the States. Friday evening services were about to begin. Shabbos. Sabbath. Would I like to join them? It was an Orthodox shul, but they were only able to heat the women's section, so that's where the services were held. Men crowded around the bema, a raised kind of podium in the middle of the room which held the Torah, the holy book. The few women in attendance worshiped on the rim. When it came to that place in the service where the Torah was read I was actually called to make an aliya, a going up. I was being asked to read the Torah portion for that evening. How ironic I thought! Me who used to cut Hebrew school to play the pinball machines in Knocko's pool hall. Barochu adonai homvorach...I could do this thing, and when the service was over, after the Sabbath candles were lit, after the spice box was passed around and the wine sipped, after I had read the words of five thousand years I felt so honored I wanted to give something back larger than what had been given me, but I've never been able to figure out what that could have been.

I didn't want that evening in Prague to end, and so a lot of chatting, questions, declaratives, one or two imperatives, and a lot of translating went on for awhile in the women's section. At some point the man who originally invited us in brought over a young man, 21,22, who spoke sixteen or seventeen languages and had worked as a government guide until his sister escaped to Israel, and he was made to work as a baggage handler in the airport. A member of the Jewish underground, he volunteered to give us a tour of the city completely off the government's books. Everywhere we went people discussed politics at a variety of decibel levels, none a whisper. It reminded me of my uncles back in Baltimore after the seder in the living room hollering at each other about Adelai  Stevenson's abilities even though they all basically agreed he had them. Eisenhower? Don't talk to me about Eisenhower. Five stars. Big deal.

The last night we were in Prague we invited our guide for dinner at the hotel with two young Spanish women we'd befriended who were touring from Franco's Spain. Our guide spoke Spanish, Italian, English and other languages which sounded like three forks caught in a garbage disposal. The Spaniards spoke Italian and Spanish. I spoke English and really stupid Italian. My wife's was much better. A whole lot of translating going on there as well. The topic was freedom. Can you imagine? Freedom. Here, in Eastern Europe, with a communist Jew under an authoritarian government, two conservative catholic women from Franco's Spain who did not fret over their own authoritarian regime ("Everyone has health care"), and two Americans who had come of political age in the sixties, still inspired by the Weavers but having missed Woodstock. The food made Spam look good, but the conversation was a three ring circus of opinions and counter opinions, thought clusters countered by thought clusters, epiphanies, moments of disbelief or wonder. All of us were enjoying life at that moment. Even our Czech guide seemed happy. Me? I was mesmerized. If I had not said, "Shalom", an experience more astonishing than any dream I could have conjured would never have been.

Shalom.

PINO - Pirate In Name Only

First it's "Rock-a-bye-Baby". Then, pretty soon, way too soon and not really even very pretty, it's "Ol Rockin'  Chair's Got me". Remember that Jimmy Buffet song from way back in the 70's? A Pirate Looks At Forty? Was a time when the mere plink of its first cord conjured an air of nostalgia. "Mother, mother ocean, I can hear your call..." 

"I'm not done yet, but the signs are there,"  says the music. "I've taken a lickin', but I'm still tickin'". There's still a score out there waiting for me!

But, a pirate looks at eighty? Geesus! He damn near sleeps with the fishes! My hands are too gnarled to wield a proper cutlass, laddy. My feet creak like the deck of a dry-docked ship. My eyes reckon with mist. My cheeks have sun spots. My teeth still bite but my gut rebels at what it once found scrumptious. My ears swash buckle. The rocking chair was invented so the elderly could sustain some semblance of ci]rculation even though they sat all day, along with creating a few extra endorphins to keep 'em quiet and in place. "Ol' Rockin' Chair's Got me". I have one in every room. 

If you can look me in the eyes and enumerate the glories of aging without batting a lash you're a better liar than I am.

The Rose Kid

HOW I GOT MY FIRST JOB IN THEATER

Make no mistake about it - not that you would - but I am not Binary (Is that with a capital "B"?). Never felt the call, but you can’t be in theater without knowing gay people - lots of them - so get over it. No big deal. I was used to guys hitting on me but physically not emotionally. Physically, just push them away, but, emotionally? How do you deal with that?

I was new to theater having recently bullshat my way into the position of assistant stage manager at the Cape Cod Melody Tent for the summer season, 1965 - ten weeks; ten musicals. I’d just finished my first year at Yale graduate school in playwriting and dramatic literature, looked around and believed I’d come to a crossroads. What were all those playwrights doing for work now that they've graduated? Writing in places without heat and a toilet down the hall is what I could determine. I could return to my home town to a safe job already waiting for me, or grab the opportunity to lie my way into a summer stock job and plunge ahead into a lifetime of insecurity.I took the plunge.

My roommate had just turned down the job, and I,half in jest,said tell them I'm available. Mind you, I knew nothing.They must've really been hard up because, lo and behold, a call came from NYC: could I possibly meet them for an interview? Sure!

Again, mind you, I knew nothing. How many productions and what was my favorite, was one of the first questions asked. Well, hell, I had never directed or produced anything,let alone acted, but I had sat through a year of directors doing their stuff at Yale so I rattled off Albee and Beckett and Ibsen and, of course, Shaw. My favorite? Uh, well, lemme see, uh, Beckett. OK? Lying through my teeth. I got the job.I was now an assistant stage manager except I had very little notion of what an ASM did. Consequently, midway through the season, long after it had become obvious how incompetent I was, I was nearly fired.How I turned it around I don't know, but I did. It was a tough learn, but it was a true learn, so, by the end of the season, I had a union card and a means of making a living in the theatre, which I’d come to love. And that’s how I met Joe Tremaine aka The Rose Kid.

One of the ten shows packing in that summer was West Side Story which meant two gangs of “gypsies” - the Sharks and the Jets - would descend on our tent for a week’s rehearsal and a week’s run. A gypsy in this sense meant a Broadway dancer of great skill and wild reputation, the theatre’s own visceral herd of show ponies. They moved fluidly from show to show. Hence, “gypsies”, their very daily lives a constant audition for A Chorus Line, which was decades from birth. Joe was one of them although he hadn’t yet begun to manifest his particular visions of empire, at least, not out loud. He would become an impresario - an international force in his field - but that was years in the making. When we first met, Joe was a chorus boy.

One evening I unlatched the door to the ramshackle shed that functioned as my office only to find a red, long stem rose on my clipboard along with an affectionate note signed by someone calling himself the Rose Kid. What it said it said softly and innocently. It was not salacious. It was not predatory. It was sweet and kind, really, simply, a request for friendship. My reaction was cruel and shallow. It was an affection for which I wasn't prepared, nor did I know how to react except to laugh and ridicule and make farce of someone else's feelings. I don't know what I did, but I might well have minced and lisped and otherwise performed some moronic mockery of what I would come to see as a dear dear act of caring and kindness.

"I would like to be your friend," was what the note said, was all it said."I would like to be your friend." It was signed, "The Rose Kid".

I remember Joe being mortified at this revelation and humiliated at the manner in which I revealed it - mincing and lisping and truly demeaning. I remember this tiny female dancer (Was she a Shark or a Jet?) unloading on me as the callous imbecile I was, shaming me in front of the other dancers, confronting my behavior and forcing me to confront it, too.It was the first time I realized a man could actually have a heart. I was suddenly so ashamed of myself and yet surprised (and embarrassed) that I felt such shame because one always made fun of guys like that, didn't one? What'd I do wrong? I was just joking. My cruel and callow prancing about had been rehearsed for years. I was just joking.

But that was then, and now is now, and the irony of it all is that Joe Tremaine and I became lifelong buddies. I don't know how, and I don't know why, however, in the instant our atoms collided, somewhere between his confession and my repudiation, we became friends deep down in the bones.

To this day our connection baffles me, but there it is, strong as ever. Although we rarely see each other - a handful of times in the decades following that season of stock - if I needed something, I believe Joe would be there as if we'd just spoken that morning.I'd make a pot of coffee, and we'd sit there and talk. Where I go Joe goes. He keeps me honest.

Thoughts During Solstice, 2023

Listen. 

That sweet, sweet sound. Remember Wind in the Willows? It's the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. Try to remember. The baby otter safely sleeping, curled up in the lap of dawn as the satyr pipes in the morning sun. 

Dorian Alexander, four years old, is asleep in Jamie's lap. She ruffles his hair like the gentle wind ruffling through dry meadow grass. She hums like the brook beside the house. Her face reflects the peace in his. Her breathing reflects the pace of his. And what I do is what I always do; I watch and I remember. I remember so that when the winds are not so gentle I can still feel them whispering in my ears, nuzzling my cheeks, readying me to outrun the storm.

Montana Days: The Three Silences

Due to a technological glitch, I haven't been able to publish the interview I'd intended. I was twenty-two years old and had just had my first play produced at Morgan. I'll keep working on it. In the meantime, here's a piece about silence in the woods. 

        Maybe it's happened to you. You're out in the woods poking along, enjoying the day, driven by no particular goal when, suddenly,the forest becomes as quiet as an execution. Noise stops. You stop. You listen carefully. You wish your ears were as powerful as those receivers deployed to pick up transmissions from deep space. Silence in the woods is heard only rarely during the cycle of a natural day. Dawn and dusk rather, the hour preceding light and that preceding darkness are two times you can depend upon. These are the hours when the beasts of the day and the beasts of the night take each other's place – some to prowl, some to sleep. One can sense the creatures passing each other through a kind of ceasefire zone as they exchange positions in the forest, so it is nearly, but not absolutely, a silence. There is still movement. Time goes by. 

        The second silence is death. You may never be caught by this silence, yet, in the woods, its presence is undeniable. If you are fortunate, you have watched predators stalk their prey. They carry the possibility of death - death on the way, death to come - and so they carry it with them in silence. Animals desert the area or stay still. This silence has a palpable presence of its own, one that takes sense beyond the other six to detect. It is how a man can feel (though he might never see) an animal watching him.

        Downed prey is death in fact, and this final silence is deeper than any. Suddenly, there is an absence of a life in the forest. The void will be filled eventually, even quickly, but, while it is there, every being in its presence is commanded by it. Neither is this final silence one of peace. There is an edge
to it, an air of uneasiness, a sense of mortality and danger. Peace obtains only when the forest is filled with the commotion of its creatures as they go about their lives. This "noise" is what most people love about the woods, and what they accept as quiet.

Portrait of The Playwright As A Young Man - Morgan State Interview, 1963

Click here to see the video:

https://growingolderbystephenforeman.blogspot.com/2023/06/portrait-of-playwright-as-young-man.html

Screwed Up - Portrait, etc.

 Technological SNAFU. Trying to rectify.

Excerpt of a documentary done on Morgan State in 1962 or 3.

Stay tuned.

Stephen

Buddy Dean's Bandstand - For The Blumster

It was 1957, and not one teenager in the country wanted to be anywhere after school but on the set of Dick Clark's "American Bandstand", then America's most popular television show, an after school production out of Philadelphia that featured local kids dancing on the Bandstand Committee, and grandstanded popular acts of the day like Bill Hailey and Fats Domino, Theresa Brewer, probably, Sandra Dee, for sure. The kids would dance, the acts did their thing, the kids danced some more: that was the basic format for each show, and you would mangle your best friend to be a member of that committee, to especially be a member of that committee when a viewer calls in a request to see you dance, just you, and your partner , of course (Nobody ever danced alone). If it were me - Here I'm getting ahead of myself - it would have been a request for Steve & Phyllis. Phyllis had buck teeth, but she could make out like she wanted to eat your face and and she was very smart and very funny, and, oh, boy, could she dance - a very athletic version of the jitterbug, lots of twirls. As you might expect, "American Bandstand" metastasized to cities all over the country, including ours, Baltimore, Maryland. WAAM TV. Channel 13 - Buddy Deane's Bandstand!

Every day after school, if you didn't have practice or detention, you were glued to the twelve inch screen on your Philco or Dupont or Emerson television set as the bandstand committee danced to the latest pop hit. To be a member of that committee was to be a god. To be anywhere near was to be radioactive. My friend who is, by now, a respectable elder and noted pickle ball addict but then was a f***up in good standing like the rest of us and shall thereby henceforth go by the nickname, Blum. Well, Blum (aka The Blumster) had a crush on Gail, a petite, cute as hell, adorable dancer who was a star on the bandstand committee. The problem was he didn't know her and knew no way of meeting her. That vaunted bandstand committee. The Untouchables. How was a mere mortal to breach  Valhalla? Who was he? Who were we? "Just do it," I said to myself, "Just do it!" How? Blum thought I was crazy. "Tell you what," I told him, "Dress in chinos and a button down shirt tomorrow, and bring a tie."

    "Why?"

    "We're goin' on Bandstand."

    "You're nuts."

    "Trust me."

I was so sure of myself back then. Nobody just "got on" Bandstand. One was Selected. Mortals simply sat and watched. 

WAAM -TV sat on a hill top. The studio entrance was out back which is where the kids on the Bandstand Committee congregated after school before the guard let them in. Mind you, not everyone got in, only the elite, the Committee. This particular afternoon most of them were in place when Blum and I got off public transit and simply tagged onto the crowd of maybe thirty kids. I tied his tie, and he tied mine, just as if we were regulars, very cool, maneuvering step by step into the middle of it all so that when the guard finally opened the door we nonchalantly swarmed in with everyone else. Phyllis was the sister of a kid in my class, so we connected right away. We were pretty good, too. Every so often we'd get a special request to dance on camera where we'd jitterbug our hearts out to whatever record Buddy Dean had spun. I don't remember how Blum connected with Gail, but he did, and they became stars on the show. Everybody wanted to see them dance. Everybody. 

Fade out, as they say in the movie business, and Fade In. Thirty years later. Blum is big into racquet ball, and plays a series of matches with a woman ranked tenth in her home state (not his). She was visiting friends who belonged to this same club. Her name was Gail and, yes. she did look vaguely familiar, but that was it until it dawned on Blum that Gail was actually the Gail as in the Buddy Dean Bandstand Gail! The Very One! Born and bred in the city of Johnny Unitas. The one. Only she drew a blank. Moved from Baltimore long ago. Remembered nothing. Not a flip. Not a dip. Not a twirl. Nada. Blum was crushed. I was talking to him just the other day. Now, pickle ball is in, but he's still crushed.

The Fawn

In all my years of tromping through the boondocks I have never witnessed a birth in the wild. I've seen young fawns and cubs and pups and kits and chicks. I've seen kills but never births. This morning that changed.

Way up deep in the recesses of our property lies an exquisitely beautiful and isolated site which we rent out to campers. We border state land, so, essentially, hikers and campers have 250,000 acres in which to roam. Talk about social distancing, you're literally off the grid. However, if the demons get you, wi-fi is available on our front porch, one half mile south, just down hill. 

This morning I was guiding a camper to the site when a huge white tail doe (I've never seen bigger) not ten yards away sprang up out of the grass, took a single bound and turned to face us, dared us to take one more step. That's when I saw this little tiny thing, slick and wet, quivering, unable to stand - newly born - moments old - maybe even seconds - newly on this earth - and Mom, bristling like a phalanx, ready to do battle for her baby. I gaped at the thing, so naked and helpless. I held the mother's eyes. She stomped. Her warning. Mesmerizing as the two of them were, it would have been cruel to stand there, so we moved on. She was still there when I passed by on my way back down, already poised and battle ready, sprung from the tall grass, standing over this little thing, still wet and quivering, now trying for its feet, failing, bleating. Some would say this was a miracle, this birth, this singular event, but I think, really, it's the culmination of events that began when the days grew shorter and the sunlight less. A stag, perhaps more than one, took her, and she carried the seed of what would become this fawn through the harsh winds of our winter months on a starvation diet, avoiding predators, and yarding up for warmth when the weather became unbearable, even for her. And then the weather breaks, and the boisterous jays go away and the tree frog pipers come back, and this tiny thing continues to grow in her belly until, finally, the grass is high enough to hide her, and she gives birth. But it is not just one singular sensation; the miracle has been happening all along. Watch for it. Black Elk, a Sioux mystic, claimed the Holy Land is everywhere, not just a sandy spot in the Middle East. Do I need to believe in God to be astonished?